video ipod questions

I have been out of the tech. loop for the past few monthes so the video ipod is brand new to me. I just picked one up today want to take advantage of its capabilities as soon possible. so i have a few questions

best way to take personal .mov .mp4 etc file movies and putting them on the ipod....as in do i need to convert them to another format..does itunes do that all for me...( i sound like a tech. idiot really im just new to the vid ipod)

when/if i will be be converting movies are the certain specs i should convert to resolution etc.

I can't seem to get isquint to work properly. I have been using ffmpegX. It's free, just do a search for it on versiontracker. While i haven't loaded anything onto my wife's ipod yet(christmas gift, so it's not open yet) I have had no problem getting the videos to load into itunes, so I imagine it would not be a problem loading them into the ipod.